ONE 
STRANGE THINGS can happen at a crossroads.
It might look like nothing but a place where two dusty roads meet, but a crossroads can be something more. A crossroads can be something special, a compass with arms reaching to places you might never find the way to again; places that might exist, or might have existed once, or might exist someday, depending on whether or not you decide to look for them.
But whatever else it might be, a crossroads is a place where you choose.
The town of Arcane sat very near one such place, a shallow bowl of waving grass and scrubby trees where two highways met alongside the remnants of a dried-up river. On one of those highways you could go all the way from Los Angeles, California, to Washington, D.C. A fellow could leave his home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and visit family all the way north in Canada by way of the other. They were well-traveled roads, but there were great stretches of America along them where nothing much had yet been built, so Arcane and the other little towns that had sprung up here and there had hotels and saloons, dry-goods general stores, and water pumps and stables for the travelers passing through.
A hundred years ago, there had been a town there where the roads met, but now it was only a deserted shell of bare foundations and uneasy walls that leaned at odd angles under collapsing roofs. The founders of Arcane had started from scratch a little ways down the east-west road, and the new town had grown up stronger and bigger than the husk they now called the Old Village. But (maybe because of the nearness to that eerie, half-crumbled ghost town) travelers didn’t stop off in Arcane for long. Folks bought their cans of gasoline or shoes for their horses or had a wheel replaced, but if they thought they could make it to the next town, even if the wheel bumped or the horse limped a little, they would try. People didn’t like to stop in Arcane if they could help it, even if they weren’t sure why. Even the drifter with the carpetbag and the old tin lantern slung on a pole over his shoulder wasn’t likely to linger for more than a meal and a night’s rest before starting another long march. Although, with this particular drifter, it would be hard to say for certain.
“My kind of town,” he muttered to no one in particular as he paused where the two roads met to survey the tumble-down remains of a general store. Despite the glaring sun overhead, the lantern glowed dimly through a pattern of holes punched in the sides. It gave a quiet jangle as he turned to watch the progress of a little twist of swirling dust crossing his path.
With his free hand he yanked the felt hat off his head and wiped sweat from his forehead before shucking out of his long leather coat. He pulled a watch from his pocket—a rather nicer watch than one would expect a drifter to carry—and flipped it open. He glanced down the eastbound road, away from the town of Arcane, and made a noise of impatience before adjusting the carpetbag and the lantern and continuing on. He had a roustabout’s lean muscle, and although life on the road usually put years on a man quicker than life in town, under the sweat and smudges of dirt his face looked young. Only his eyes, light green like old glass and lined with wrinkles from squinting against the sun, gave any impression of age.
The drifter smiled as he strode toward Arcane, but the smile was odd and awkward, and even he walked a little faster on his way out of the Old Village than he had on the way in.
The people who lived in Arcane were just like anyone else. They went to work, kept kitchen gardens and cats and dogs, and had jobs and children and houses with broken screen doors or squeaky porch steps. The children waited all year for summer holidays, then for winter holidays and presents, then for summer again. There were bullies and victims, rich kids and poor ones, like there are anywhere.
But strange things can happen at a crossroads, and even if you were a perfectly normal child in a crossroads town you’d grow up hearing stories, maybe even see one of those odd happenings yourself. For instance, by the time she was thirteen years old Natalie Minks knew all those strange stories by heart. She knew the one about how the Old Village became an abandoned shell, and all the tales of that ancient forest to the southwest of Arcane, in which strange things had walked long ago. She even knew why Mrs. Corusk, who kept a little farm at the north edge of town, insisted on living by candlelight when most everybody else had had electricity since before Natalie was born.
It was hard sometimes to tell which stories were true and which ones weren’t, but if Natalie was sure of anything, it was that in Arcane, you couldn’t be sure of anything at all.
Except maybe my family, Natalie thought as her father slammed his finger in the big barn doors the way he always did when he came into his shop. Her family never seemed to change.
“Found it,” he announced, waving a wrench over his head with his uninjured hand.
Natalie reached for a bicycle tire hanging on the wall and used it to pull herself up onto one of his workbenches. “How far’s the trip?”
“About a hundred and ten miles.” Her father sucked in a breath. “Natalie, be—”
A socket wrench on the bench launched itself from under her foot and skittered across the floor—no wonder her dad was always tripping over things in here. Natalie grabbed the tire again to keep from stepping on her father’s collection of radio parts, only to have it spring away from the wall in her hand. Her arms windmilled.
Her father sprinted to catch her and took the most obstacle-laden route to do it, filling the shop with unmistakable sounds of destruction. Natalie caught her balance just in time to keep from landing on her backside on the shop floor, trampling any radio tubes, or, worse, stepping on the little clockwork flyer she and her father were building together.
“Careful,” she said as her father skidded uselessly to a halt beside where she stood on the workbench. “I know.”
He gave her a severe look and picked his way back across the shop to return to what he’d been working on.
She wouldn’t have cared much about a bruise, but the flyer, which she and her dad called the Wilbur after the Wright brother who’d died only last year, was a mechanical labor of love. It was an automaton (the word itself was one of Natalie’s newest and most favorite acquisitions), a small machine that would eventually move on its own when wound with a key. She set it aside gently, careful not to upset the gears inside it that controlled the tiny propellers and wings.
On tiptoe she could just see out the little window high on the wall above the workbench. She wiped a few years’ worth of grime off the glass and stared at the crowd on the street. Of course, they were trying not to look like a crowd, but on any other Wednesday morning, half the town of Arcane would’ve had better things to do than try to look busy outside Minks’s Bicycle Shop.
“You got an audience.” Natalie stretched a little farther and saw a clutch of boys from school playing halfheartedly with a board balanced on a big tin can. A few girls nearby pretended to watch them. It was the first day of the summer holiday. For sure the kids had better things to do. “A big audience,” Natalie said smugly.
A noise like a circus animal passing gas erupted from the hulk of machinery crouching at the center of the shop. It didn’t sound healthy.
“Dad?”
Only her dad’s lower half was visible; the top half was hidden in the boxy front of the machine. Natalie waited patiently until the thing was puttering rhythmically and asked again, louder, “Dad. It’s going to run, right?”
“Sure.” His voice sounded like it was coming from inside a tin can. When he emerged he gave her a sooty smile. “It’ll work. I promise.”
When Natalie ventured outside an hour later, the crowd on the street had doubled in size. No point in trying to melt into it; they were all watching her. She climbed up to sit on the edge of a rain barrel and nonchalantly shined an apple on her overalls.
The first person to give up pretending he wasn’t waiting for the big barn doors of Ted Minks’s shop to open was a kid called George Sills. He sauntered over and gave Natalie a gap-toothed sneer. “My dad says Doc Fitzwater’s motorcar couldn’t make it across town, let alone all the way to Pinnacle.”
Natalie chewed her apple and made a point of watching Old Tom Guyot shuffle across the street with his crutch and tin guitar instead of acknowledging George Sills. Tom was more interesting anyway.
George was fourteen and didn’t like being ignored. He kicked the barrel she was sitting on hard enough to make Natalie grab the rim for balance. She gave him a withering glare.
“It’s not just a motorcar, it’s a Winton.” A lot of motorcars came through Arcane, and they weren’t all the same. There were little runabouts and bigger touring cars, Stanhope-style and high-wheeler-style autos. Some of the older ones had tillers to steer with; the newer ones had steering wheels. Most had radiators to keep their engines cooled with water (although Natalie had seen a Franklin once that was air-cooled and looked a little odd without a big radiator sticking up in front). Doc’s car, like most of them, had to be wound with a crank to start up, but the new Cadillacs started electrically, and they came with electric lamps.
Natalie had seen nearly all the Fords, except the Model A, and could even tell the difference between the N, S, and T models. She had seen a few kinds of Bakers, a Moon, and a Speedwell—even a Fiat from Italy and an Oldsmobile Limited limousine earlier this year. That was a pretty motorcar. The Winton, though . . . the Winton was beautiful.
But explaining the difference to George Sills would be like trying to teach the alphabet to a puppy.
“Who cares what kind it is? It’s ten years old! Dad says Doc could drive it over to the soda fountain, maybe, but only ’cause it’s downhill all the way.”
“Sure, if it was up to your dad. If it was up to your dad, Doc’s motorcar wouldn’t make it ten feet.” Natalie spat a seed to the ground. “Your dad couldn’t change a bicycle tire.”
George’s hands curled instantly into fists. Natalie jumped down, shoved her bangs out of her face, and brought up her knuckles the way Jack Johnson did in boxing pictures. If George was stupid enough to try anything in front of the whole town, she’d abandon all scruples and go straight for the knee he was still favoring after their last fight, her third—no, fourth—thrashing from George this month.
But before either of them could make a move at the other, the lumpy head of an alligator landed on George Sills’s shoulder. He took one look, made a sound like a creaky window being shoved up, and jumped back about four feet.
The leathery shrunken head was little, brown, and attached to the end of a cane in the hand of a man as tall and thin and pale as a birch tree. His white hair stood up in windblown shocks all over his head, and his face had more lines than space between. “I’ll have you know a fellow drove a motorcar like mine all the way from California to New York before there were proper roads across the country, Master Sills.”
“Hi, Dr. Fitzwater.” George tried to look as though he hadn’t just screamed like a little girl.
Doc wore a monocle in one eye. The look he gave George through the little gold-rimmed lens made the boy turn tail and flee across the street. Then he took the monocle out and began to shine it with his handkerchief. The look he gave Natalie without it was much kinder.
“I understand you were in charge of polishing, Miss Minks. I expect the old beast will blind us all when it comes into the sun.” His voice didn’t match his creased and pitted face. It was more like the way new tires ran over smooth dirt roads: a steady, low sound like a purr. She opened her mouth to tell Doc how pretty the motorcar looked now, but the metallic whine of rusty hinges interrupted her. Every head in the street turned.
The shop doors were opening.
Ted Minks, sooty-faced and grinning, appeared in the dark gap between the big barn doors. He pushed one wide, then the other, and disappeared back into the shadows. A moment later, the broad nose of the Winton emerged.
It was a dark red motorcar with two high, tufted leather seats open to the air, and wheels with spokes, just like bicycle tires. Two of its headlamps were like eyes set back on either side, wide like a frog’s, and the third was a single, Cyclopean eyeball in a brass casing, fixed right to the middle of the radiator. It had a steering wheel stuck up in front of the seat on the right-hand side. The brass fittings and trim that Natalie had polished so obsessively glowed.
She caught George Sills’s eye across the street and stuck out her tongue.
“Hey, Doc!” her father called, wiping the sweat off his forehead and leaving broad, grimy fingerprints there instead. “How about a drive?”
Doc made a show of considering. “Wouldn’t want to disappoint all the good folks who happened by to see me off.”
“Guess we’d better see if your car works after all.” Mr. Minks spotted Natalie leaning on her barrel. “Mind giving me a little help, Nattie?”
Mind? She was in the driver’s seat almost before he finished talking, fingers wrapped securely around the wheel, just in case.
Her father turned the crank with both hands. “Ready?”
“Ready!”
It sputtered to life, just as he promised it would, and the street around them erupted into applause.
“Listen to the old beast growl.” Doc Fitzwater put a gnarled palm on the steering wheel. “I can’t believe you did all this in just three days.” Natalie resisted the urge to smirk at George again. Anyway, her dad could’ve fixed the Winton up even faster if he’d wanted to. She had spent more time pestering him to let her help than he’d spent on the motorcar itself, until the three of them—Natalie, her brother, Charlie, and her father—had had to work through the night to get it ready for today.
Now Doc turned to Mr. Minks and spoke quietly, his back to the crowd. “I’m going as far as the Pearys’ farm today, then by tomorrow afternoon I’ll be in Pinnacle and you can ring the central exchange if you need me. Maybe sooner, if Maggie Peary doesn’t insist on having a giant brunch before I leave.” Natalie’s father nodded, smiled tightly, and held out his hand to shake Doc’s. “Nothing to worry about,” Doc said.
It was a dark red motorcar with two high, tufted leather seats open to the air, and wheels with spokes, just like bicycle tires.
Natalie climbed reluctantly out of the driver’s seat while Charlie put Doc’s old Gladstone medical bag and his pebbly leather suitcase in the back of the motorcar. Doc turned to face the people on the street and shouted over the puttering engine.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you all came out for the old Winton, not for me.” He climbed into the seat and propped up his alligator-head cane beside him. “As soon as the epidemic in Pinnacle’s under control, I’ll chug straight back. In the meantime, Lester’s ready to step in if anyone gets a headache while I’m gone.”
Actually, red-faced Lester Finch looked pretty nervous to Natalie as he waved from the doorway of the pharmacy a little ways down the street. Then again, when had she seen him looking any other way?
Natalie looked around at the assembled town. There was her little gang of friends, a pair of boys and one prissy-looking girl; there was George Sills, giving them all the evil eye; her teacher, Miss Tillerman; Mr. Maliverny, who ran the saloon; and a drifter with a carpetbag and an old lantern at his feet. The drifter had the delighted look of a kid who’d stumbled on a sporting event. He caught Natalie’s glance and winked one pale green eye.
There was Mr. Swifte, the smith from Ogle’s stables; the woman Natalie privately thought of as the town hag, Mrs. Byron, who was (as usual) scowling disapprovingly at her; Simon Coffrett, the man who lived in Arcane’s only mansion, flipping his pocket watch over and over in his fingers as he watched the scene over the rims of his glasses; and tiny, bent, old Chester Teufels in his shabby, threadbare suit being studiously ignored by everyone around him as he stood in an unobtrusive corner chewing on a fingernail. Nothing out of the ordinary here.
Her gaze passed over all the excited or doubtful or curious folks watching Doc and his motorcar until her eyes fell on Old Tom Guyot’s face, black and craggy and sharp-planed as a nugget of coal, and his ancient tin guitar slung over one shoulder.
Old Tom was watching her.
Natalie tilted her head. Was that so odd? After all, a minute ago she’d been the center of attention, sitting up in the driver’s seat. But Tom wasn’t just looking at her, he was watching her. All the while his head nodded slightly, as if to say Yes, You’re right; yes . . .
She looked away quickly, blushing a little as if she’d been the one caught staring. Her gaze landed on Simon Coffrett, and she flinched. There was no mistaking it.
Mr. Coffrett was watching her, too.
It came out of nowhere—one minute she was just another part of the excitement of Doc’s departure, the next she was part of something else entirely. Something was happening here that had nothing to do with Doc’s motorcar. Something was happening here that she didn’t understand.
Or something was going to happen . . .
A grinding pop drew her attention: Doc releasing the brake. Once again Natalie was just a thirteen-year-old girl standing with her curious neighbors, watching an old man drive an old motorcar out of town on an ordinary June morning.
They followed him down Bard Street, the main road through Arcane, then watched him go as far as the crossroads, where he became a dark little speck heading east. Soon he was out of sight.
“What’s an epidemic?”
The moment it was out, Natalie wished she hadn’t asked. Annie Minks always took questions seriously, which meant you had to be careful what you asked, and when. The kitchen was smoky already, and her mother didn’t need anybody’s help to burn another batch of pancakes. She turned away from the stovetop with the eager look she got when she was about to explain something. Natalie sighed.
“It’s when a lot of people get sick with the same thing at the same time. Like the black plague, or smallpox, or influenza.” Behind her, a plume of gray collected over the griddle.
“Like what’s happening in Pinnacle?” Natalie asked, staring at the stovetop. The pancakes had smelled good for a minute, too. “Mama . . . ?”
Her mother opened her mouth to answer, then sniffed the air and remembered she was cooking. Natalie propped her chin up with her fist, elbow resting on the table, and watched Mrs. Minks turn the pancakes one by one to reveal their burned black bellies.
People said Natalie and her mother looked alike. It was hard to tell at thirteen, though; her mother was tall and liked brightly colored lawn dresses and shoes with heels, and her hair seemed perfectly happy all twisted up at the back of her head the way she had it right now. She had a compact of face powder that smelled like sunlight and a string of pearls that had belonged to Natalie’s grandmother, which Natalie had worn exactly once, in a school play. She was, Natalie thought it was fair to say, beautiful.
Natalie wore dresses under protest. Overalls were much more convenient, and her favorite shoes were a pair long outgrown by her brother. Her hair mostly stayed in a ponytail nowadays, but a few pieces still insisted on coming loose (although those bits were growing out pretty well, considering how short she’d had to cut them a few months back—there had been an incident at school with some glue that she was pretty sure was George Sills’s doing).
On the other hand, Natalie’s disorderly hair was just about the same shade of nearly-black as her mother’s, and her eyes were almost the same color, too: light brown, the color of coffee made just the way her mother liked, with a slosh of cream and a homemade sugar cube and a tablespoon of rum. Usually, starting about May, they even got the same wildly multiplying batch of freckles across their noses, which they would compare at the end of each sunny day, looking for any new matching spots. This year, though, Natalie’s freckles were even more profuse than usual—lately her mother’s face looked downright pale by comparison.
Mrs. Minks scraped the blackened pancakes into a pail with the rest of the spoiled ones and poured fresh batter on the griddle. “In Pinnacle they just have a persistent sort of flu, but it’s got a lot of people sick.”
Natalie decided to keep quiet until at least one batch made it safely onto a plate; her stomach was grumbling and the kitchen was getting hot. Then she remembered something. “Mr. Finch looked worried when Doc left.”
Her mother’s shoulders did something funny, as if she’d felt a sudden draft.
“Well . . . people will be expecting Mr. Finch to fill Doc’s shoes while he’s gone. I’m sure that’s upsetting . . . to him.”
“But Mr. Finch knows how to give out medicines and take care of people, doesn’t he?”
“Yes, but it’s not the same as having Doc.” Her voice did something chilly, similar to what her shoulders had done a moment before. “It’s . . . not the same.”
Not the same? Not much of an answer by anybody’s standards, let alone her mother’s. Still, it looked like this might be the one: the batch that survived. Natalie bit her lips to keep quiet while the edges of the pancakes set. Two more minutes. Maybe less . . .
Then her father and Charlie came in, smelling like the rough soap they used to get the oil and grime of the bicycle shop off.
“You didn’t need to cook,” Natalie’s father said. Mrs. Minks turned and hugged her husband tightly. It looked like the end of the pancakes’ last chance for survival, until Charlie took the spatula out of her thin hand and removed them from the skillet himself.
“What happens,” Natalie asked when all four of them were seated with breakfast safely on the table, “if people start getting sick here?”
“Mr. Finch will take care of it,” Charlie said.
“Mama says it’s not the same.”
Their mother looked at her plate. “Mr. Finch is fine.”
“But that’s not what you said.”
For a moment there was quiet around the table. “I’m sure Lester Finch won’t think twice about wiring a message to Doc in Pinnacle,” Natalie’s father said, looking at his wife.
“Just send a wire?” Natalie demanded. “That’s all? But what if it’s the Pinnacle flu? How would we know?”
“Mr. Finch could tell if the flu from Pinnacle showed up here,” Charlie put in. Natalie shot him a Shut up, will you? look. Since when did her brother know anything about flus?
Flus, epidemics, persistent strange ailments, and know-it-all big brothers . . . she emerged from her thoughts just in time to hear her father say, “I bet I know how Natalie’s going to spend the first day of the summer.”
“Can we work on my automaton? I found a piece that only fits when it’s backwards, so the, the cam doesn’t—”
“I think I need a day away from gears, Nattie. Besides,” he said with a smile, “don’t you have something to show off to Miranda and the rest of your gang?”
He looked so proud.
“Oh, yeah. I guess I forgot.” She dropped her chin back onto her fist and drew circles in the maple syrup on her plate with her fork.
While Natalie fidgeted at her kitchen table and Doc Fitzwater made his steady, chugging way out of town, another crowd in another dusty village watched a little caravan prepare for a different departure.
At the reins of the wagon in front, a tall man in blue-lensed spectacles stood and waved, smiling a showman’s smile that did not reach his eyes. The hands that held the reins wore expensive leather gloves in a pearly pale ivory shade. A silk top hat sat on the seat beside him, and his mane of red hair shot through with gray shone in the sun. It waved about a touch more than it seemed it ought to in the soft breeze.
He sat with a whirl of dark cloak and flicked his wrists. The wagon lurched into motion, the first in a train of more old and peeling wagons drawn by mottled mules. The procession left a rattle of glass and the faint carnival smell of fresh hay, frying grease, and spun candy in its wake.
The caravan turned westward, toward Arcane.